I wonder how much this is a real possibility or just tonic lotion for hair growth. DNA is very delicate. Also, how about reading and writing speed? What about reliability of this kind of method? I don't think this is just a matter of capacity . This might have some niche application where capacity is high priority

As I mentioned in the last thread, these folks need to talk to people in the EE and CS departments at their university. Data encoding was studied to death in the 50s-70s and there are existing encoding schemes that provide guaranteed transitions with far less overhead than their approach. Finding the optimal encoding method for DNA using information theory and empirical data on the types of transcription errors that occur would make for a very interesting interdisciplinary paper.

Do you have an 8-track player? If not, you'd have to build one from scratch to load my father's music library. Or a 5.25" floppy drive, or a particular type of magnetic tape reader, etc. The hardware we use to store information has changed with every new technology level we achieve. That makes it difficult to access information that you plan to store for decades, centuries, or millennia.

The last paragraph of the article addresses the fact that the storage media (DNA) has been around for a really, really long time and will likely continue to exist for a long while. So the tools of writing, copying, etc. that information will still be germane in centuries. So while the actual encoding process, the binary formats, the MP3 format itself may be lost the actual media is not going to change any time soon. And if it does ... well as the author states, we've got bigger issues to worry about.

Dude... what if HUMANS are just the DNA-stored data of some other civilization...?

That explains the obesity epidemic! All those Supersize fries encode data at 2.2 PB/gram... so an extra 20 kilos on each data node, er, person, ....42.9 exabytes of data! Clearly the use of high fructose corn syrup and fatty foods is an alien plot to increase their storage efficiency.

Do you have an 8-track player? If not, you'd have to build one from scratch to load my father's music library. Or a 5.25" floppy drive, or a particular type of magnetic tape reader, etc. The hardware we use to store information has changed with every new technology level we achieve. That makes it difficult to access information that you plan to store for decades, centuries, or millennia.

The last paragraph of the article addresses the fact that the storage media (DNA) has been around for a really, really long time and will likely continue to exist for a long while. So the tools of writing, copying, etc. that information will still be germane in centuries. So while the actual encoding process, the binary formats, the MP3 format itself may be lost the actual media is not going to change any time soon. And if it does ... well as the author states, we've got bigger issues to worry about.

I suppose. But if you unearth a cache of DNA stored music and have no DNA player how is that any better than finding the 8-tracks and having no 8-track player? The technology seems really cool, but that last paragraph just seems silly to me.

Now if we could get some genetic modifications to make our bodies natively read and play back DNA MP3's...

Excellent news, does it need artificial cold storage or a cold cave would suffice? If humanity suddenly disappeared, most of our modern knowledge would disintegrate after a couple of decades, only some of your knowledge could survive a couple of centuries but after a thousands years no one would know we existed or what we knew.

This is ironic considering how much we can learn about old civilizations through clay tablets. Storing our knowledge in DNA–form could be the modern equivalent of clay tablets, they could store a lot of data for a very long time, as long as the temperature is right.

Ragashingo wrote:

I suppose. But if you unearth a cache of DNA stored music and have no DNA player how is that any better than finding the 8-tracks and having no 8-track player? The technology seems really cool, but that last paragraph just seems silly to me.

Now if we could get some genetic modifications to make our bodies natively read and play back DNA MP3's...

This actually brings to mind the movie Titan AE a little bit in terms of long term data storage. Undoubtedly a cool concept. I suspect in our lifetime we'll see much more merging between biology and technology (yeah yeah i know they've got a name for that already).

Excellent news, except for the energy requirements for long–term storing. If humanity suddenly disappeared, most of our modern knowledge would disintegrate after a couple of decades, only some of your knowledge could survive a couple of centuries but after a thousands years no one would know we existed or what we knew.

This is ironic considering how much we can learn about old civilizations through clay tablets. Storing our knowledge in DNA–form could be the modern equivalent of clay tablets, they could store a lot of data for a very long time, as long as there is energy helping preserve the DNA.

For super long term storage I am a fan of microlithography of textual information on extremely corrosion resistent metals. Use several different languages and make the print large enough that it's obvious there's something there - see for example: http://rosettaproject.org/

I suppose. But if you unearth a cache of DNA stored music and have no DNA player how is that any better than finding the 8-tracks and having no 8-track player? The technology seems really cool, but that last paragraph just seems silly to me.

Now if we could get some genetic modifications to make our bodies natively read and play back DNA MP3's...

P.S. Thanks for the good reply.

I would assume that once we get really good at genetic manipulation we'll be able to create a "self extracting archive." Just add water (maybe some sugar) and it'll "create" the 8-track player for you along with the tapes...

I suppose. But if you unearth a cache of DNA stored music and have no DNA player how is that any better than finding the 8-tracks and having no 8-track player? The technology seems really cool, but that last paragraph just seems silly to me.

Now if we could get some genetic modifications to make our bodies natively read and play back DNA MP3's...

P.S. Thanks for the good reply.

What the last sentence is saying is that, assuming humanity doesn't fall into decay for some reason, we will always be able to read DNA, even if the tools for it change. Imagine Dr. Crusher running a tricorder over someone to scan their DNA to check for genetic diseases or whatever. That same tool would be able to read the DNA sequence of an iTunes library that was encoded using Dr. McCoy's tricorder.

The point of the last sentence (or there abouts) is that if we don't have ANY tricorders laying around, we have bigger problems, like going into a technological dark ages.

As I mentioned in the last thread, these folks need to talk to people in the EE and CS departments at their university. Data encoding was studied to death in the 50s-70s and there are existing encoding schemes that provide guaranteed transitions with far less overhead than their approach. Finding the optimal encoding method for DNA using information theory and empirical data on the types of transcription errors that occur would make for a very interesting interdisciplinary paper.

With 2.2 PB / gram, do you really care about whether or not the encoding scheme is optimal at this stage? I would think the main goal is to guarantee the data can be extracted reliably.

We already store things in base-10, and for us english speakers, base-26. 8-bit ASCII? 16-bit Unicode? You get the idea. What's relevant is the overhead of encoding/decoding and validation/error checking.

I wonder how much this is a real possibility or just tonic lotion for hair growth. DNA is very delicate. Also, how about reading and writing speed? What about reliability of this kind of method? I don't think this is just a matter of capacity . This might have some niche application where capacity is high priority

Actually DNA is not as delicate as you might think it is. Especially not with all the repair mechanisms nature came up with. They completely sequenced DNA from mammoths frozen for thousands of years...try that with a CD...